Today's main teaching is for us to be ready and not to think that we can postpone our preparations for the end. When the end strikes it will be already too late. Jesus gives the examples of the time of the Flood when people ate and drank right up to the moment of disaster. Similarly in the days of Lot, people were leading their ordinary lives when fire and brimstone rained down on the wicked city of Sodom. Almost every day we read in our papers of similar cataclysms without any warning.

When the "day of the Son of Man is revealed" that is, when He comes at the end of time, it will be too late to take emergency measures. People will either be ready or not. But these texts are not intended to fill us with fear and foreboding of a capricious God. They are timely advice not to be caught napping but to remain alert to meet the Lord. In practice, of course, that final call for us is not going to coincide with the end of our planet but with the moment when our individual life on this earth will come to its end. Of the inevitability of that end there is no doubt. So let me live in such a way that I am always ready for that day. If am ready now, I will be ready then.